Network carriers (hereinafter “carrier” or “carriers”) typically accommodate a growing customer base by adding hardware resources that, among other things, store customer data and facilitate customer services. The carriers, such as telecommunication companies providing voice, video, audio, and/or other data services, may associate each node and/or sub-node of the network (e.g., intranet, Internet, etc.) with a resource record. Each resource record provides information relating to a corresponding node location on the network. Nodes and/or sub-nodes include web sites, telephones, fax machines, e-mail addresses, and/or computers.
The resource records (RRs) noted above may be managed by a domain name system (DNS), which is implemented by domain name-servers distributed throughout the network. The DNS is a system that stores information associated with domain names on networks, such as the Internet, in a distributed database located, for example, in the DNS servers. The DNS enables resolution of an internet protocol (IP) address associated with a domain name and contained in a message such as an Internet Protocol (IP) message transmitted in a network such as Internet. Resource records stored by a DNS server may include human-readable hostnames for 32 and/or 128-bit IP addresses (e.g., IPv4 and IPv6, respectively), domain name aliases, mail exchange records, mail exchange server lists for a particular domain, authority records, and/or text records. Because each server of a DNS has limited storage resources, additional servers are added from time to time to accommodate network growth.
Managing network growth, such as by allocating new resource records to servers that have adequate storage capacity, includes tedious server status monitoring and design of instructions to dictate which particular records are to be stored on which particular servers. For example, a carrier providing services to 5,000 new customers must decide which servers have capacity to store the new customer data based on a numbering plan area (NPA) (e.g., an area code), and/or an exchange (e.g., a phone number prefix, hereinafter referred to as a “prefix” and/or “NXX”). If existing servers do not have an adequate capacity to accommodate the new customers, then new servers are added and all prior rules that dictate where new resource records are stored must be modified to point to the new server(s).